A big positive here would be the book being published, like the freakonomics blog took off after freakonomics got popular and then they added more contributors who would add research that would be of interest to freakonomics readers.
I believe the freakonomics blog was started after the book was published. The blog was a spin off from the book, not the other way around.
This has been discussed some, but I don't think it's been the sole subject of a top-level post. I want to find out other people's ideas rather than driving the discussion into my ideas, so I'm asking the question in a very general form, and holding off on my own answers: